Mysterious Reviews, mysteries reviewed by the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books, is publishing a new review of Mad Hatter's Holiday by Peter Lovesey. For our blog readers, we are printing it first here in advance of its publication on our website.
Mad Hatter's Holiday by Peter Lovesey
A Sergeant Cribb Investigation
Soho Constable (Trade Paperback)
ISBN-10: 1-56947-560-1 (1569475601)
ISBN-13: 978-1-56947-560-7 (9781569475607)
Publication Date: June 2009
List Price: $14.00
Review: Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray are summoned to Brighton when a human hand is found in a crocodile exhibit in Mad Hatter's Holiday, the fourth mystery in this series by Peter Lovesey. Originally published in 1973, Soho Constable is reissuing books in this series as trade paperbacks.
Set in the early fall of 1882, the story opens with Albert Moscrop, a craftsman of optical devices with a shop in London, arriving in Brighton on holiday, and taking "an observer's interest in his fellow-beings" … for what reason or purpose is unknown, but it seems vaguely sinister. The narrative puts the reader in the role of a voyeur as well, "observing" Albert watching everyone else, an oddly compelling, if at times uncomfortable, position. He soon focuses his attention on a family: a well-to-do physician, his third wife, teenaged son from a previous marriage, toddler son with his current wife, and their nanny. Moscrop inserts himself into their lives, first as a hero, saving the toddler, later as a confidant to the wife, who thinks her husband may be trying to poison her.
Midway through the book a woman's hand is found in an exhibit at the local aquarium. The local police realize they need assistance in determining the woman's identity, and call in the Criminal Investigation Department. Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray arrive to take over the case, and get immediate assistance from Moscrop, who leads the detectives to believe the hand may belong to the wife of a physician on holiday with his family, to which he has recently become acquainted. But Cribb is suspicious of the man's motives, and the evidence he gathers suggests the hand, and other body parts he later recovers, may be of someone else entirely.
Mad Hatter's Holiday is so deftly plotted it isn't clear to the reader at any time what is true and what isn't, and who to believe and who not to trust. Though relatively short at just over 200 pages, the story is richly detailed and the characters well drawn, the setting with its grand pier a metaphor for the case, providing a contrast between the known above and the unknown below. This truly exceptional novel ends on an ambiguous note, though, which some readers may find unsettling: is the resolution to the crime that Cribb and his associates agree to be the only one plausible, indeed the correct one?
Special thanks to Soho Press for providing a copy of Mad Hatter's Holiday for this review.
Review Copyright © 2009 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved
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Synopsis (from the publisher): Brighton in 1882 is the setting of this novel of crime and tangled emotions. Albert Moscrop, a visitor whose holiday is dedicated to peering through a telescope at the seaside scene, marches down Queen’s Road to the beach and draws us through a sequence of disarmingly trivial observations into a compelling drama, played in the fashionable haunts of the nineteenth-century resort: beach, piers, promenade, swimming bath, aquarium, and Devil’s Dyke.
A keen student of human nature, Moscrop concentrates his interest on one particular family of holidaymakers—the Protheros, and especially the beautiful Zena Prothero, whose husband appears to take her excessively for granted. Gradually Moscrop moves into the circle of the Prothero family, only to become involved in a sensational murder. All Brighton is horrified by the gruesome crime. The local police seek the help of Scotland Yard, which is provided in the persons of Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray. These indomitable detectives soon find themselves challenged by the strangest case of their careers, one that is as mystifying as it is macabre.
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